If you pay money (real money) you can essentially buy the upgrades instead of having to earn them through experience. Experience can be used to upgrade your character or your gear, or unlock new classes and weapons.

As you play, you gain experience depending on your performance. The biggest problem with Tribes: Ascend is its free-to-play model. It's difficult to learn how where to shoot, and most people miss pretty often, but it's neat to have a game where it actually feels like you're in control of whether or not you get hit, instead of putting it down to random chance like in many other FPS games. This means that both hitting enemies, and being hit yourself, are fairly difficult - you have room to evade incoming projectiles, so as long as you can keep your speed up you can prevent yourself from being hit. While many modern shooters like Call of Duty and Battlefield rely heavily on guns with accurate bullet speeds, Tribes: Ascend uses the older concept of slower projectiles that have splash damage.

The other major aspect of the game is the slow projectiles. Going fast is definitely the best part of the game, and keeping the 'flow' of high speed is an exciting and potent mechanic. A good 'skiier' can be going many times faster than a character's normal running speed, and mastering skiing is key to getting good at the game. They are also equipped with jetpacks, which allows them to boost up slopes in order to keep their momentum. This allows them to build up high speed when going down slopes. However, Tribes characters can 'ski', essentially making them frictionless.

Normal running speed for Tribes characters isn't much faster than standard FPS characters'. The first of these is how the game handles movement. Tribes' gameplay utilizes two important things. A multiplayer-only game, Tribes: Ascend has a fairly standard range of game types - deathmatch, capture the flag, control points - but their diversity is not the main selling point of the game. Tribes: Ascend is notable because it represents a kind of FPS gameplay that has been neglected in recent years: that of the fast-paced sci-fi FPS, akin to games like Unreal or Quake. 'Tribes: Ascend' is a first-person shooter made by Hi Rez Studios it is currently free to play, but uses a lot of 'paid' elements (buying experience, buying gear, etc). A free-to-play resurrection of the 'Starsiege: Tribes' series, 'Tribes: Ascend' offers gameplay not found in basically any other modern shooter.

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